This invention relates to a variety of problems including the inefficient routing of electronic correspondence, such as electronic mail (email), sent from customers to a company.
Email has developed into a convenient medium for customers to provide feedback concerning a company's products and/or services. Customers are often more candid in their assessment of a company's products and services when spared a physical or even oral confrontation with a company representative. Large business entities are commonly inundated with either solicited or unsolicited email feedback. Adequately and efficiently processing this massive amount of data has typically been a time intensive and expensive process. An automatic method of routing email based on its emotional content would ease the burden on the company.
A company must employ some means to route its customers' electronic correspondence to appropriate personnel. A company may create a department to read each piece of email to determine the best route of the message, whether that be to a customer service representative (CSR), a CSR's supervisor, a public relations representative, normal routing, or other appropriate path. The time associated with physically reading each email compounded by the expense of maintaining such a department would make a company less nimble and responsive to consumer demands.
In another variation, customer e-mails can be summarized based on keywords. These summaries would reduce the amount of words that must be read, however the process is not automatic and important words can be left out of the summary. Having to read even the summaries is not an optimal use of a department's resources.
A CSR often relies on observing the physical demeanor of a customer to determine who is the best person to handle the situation. If a CSR receives a phone call from a disgruntled customer who speaks loudly and forcefully, that customer may be transferred directly to the CSR's supervisor to more adequately address the customer's concerns. Unfortunately, a CSR cannot observe the physical demeanor of a customer who sends an email. Stripped of this emotional gauge, a company must allocate substantial resources to route customer concerns.
Eudora 5.1's Moodwatch™, which was created by Qualcomm Incorporated, a Delaware corporation, is an application that classifies documents based on the document contents. More specifically, MoodWatch™ is a new language tool that acts as an emotion monitor for email that flags aggressive language and calls it to the author's attention. MoodWatch™ can detect aggressive, demeaning or rude language in the email by looking at both individual words and complete phrases. However, MoodWatch is used only to warn or alert a person of potentially offensive messages. It makes no decisions based on its alerts and does not gauge positive messaging.
In summary, the prior art provides means to manually read email and then manually determine the best person or department to act on the email. Means also exist to electronically gauge the offensiveness of email content. This art can be improved by a system that gauges both positive and negative emotion within email and then uses that determination to automatically route the email message to an appropriate company representative. Workflow routing based on the detected emotion enables a company to provide a high level of service to its customers in a more cost efficient and less time intensive manner.